


Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

by hotelmontana



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Bad Wolf Rose Tyler, F/M, Gen, Multi, Other, Post-Episode AU: s01e13 The Parting of the Ways, Ye Olde Fice, such delicious angstcakes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-20 05:08:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20669825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotelmontana/pseuds/hotelmontana
Summary: In the night, while she sleeps, she sings to him.





	Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

**Author's Note:**

> Ye Olde Fice. Originally posted on LJ in 2007. I've tried to clean up my old comma fetish, but nothing else is changed.

..while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the

total animal soup of time--

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash

of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the

vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images

juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual

images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of

consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens

Aeterna Deus...

\- Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

In the night, while she sleeps, she sings to him.

He always hears it. No matter where he is, or what he’s doing, it still finds him. Her voice joins with the TARDIS, and the two sing in perfect harmony, a golden chorus that soothes and thrills him.

She doesn’t remember it in the morning, how her voice lifts and fills dusty corners of the ship, those parts gone years unused and neglected. When she wakes, she’s fresh as a daisy--and it’s funny, he thinks, how the cliché applies. When he looks at her, he’s never reminded of her namesake so much as friendly, bobbing daisies.

He never mentions it. Doesn’t dare remind her of the reason she sings. She’s just begun to behave normally again; she smiles, wide and free, and takes his hand before he reaches for hers. It’s a miracle, he thinks, she’s still with him at all. The regeneration process was especially difficult this time. More so than ever before. His secret hope had been to hold onto that body for as long he had Rose with him. It wasn’t out of the question. He’d gone lifetimes, before, without needing to shuck his skin. That was long ago, of course, but even so, he never would have predicted that incarnation would last so short a time as it did. He’d hardly taken a breath before he changed again. The Time Lord in him tsked at the carelessness of it, running through lives like water through a sieve, each regeneration more forced, more traumatic than the last. There was a part of him, a very small part, that envied the way other Time Lords had been able to choose their regeneration. Choose a time, a place, a face.

He’d never given himself the option.

So, it was hardly fair of him to expect her not to shrink from a new voice, new hands, new clothes. Not when he hadn’t yet acclimated himself to crooked teeth, slender fingers and pinstripes, either. Not when he’d just begun to like his Northern thuggishness, his workman’s body, his jeans and jumpers and leather. Never before had he spent so little time with himself.

He accepted that, for the both of them, there would be a period of mourning for his former self.

Oh, they went about their business, of course. The business of adventuring and meddling and getting themselves in and out of trouble. They visited Jackie and Mickey, both of whom seemed to like the new him better than the old, and they visited distant planets, and since the new him seemed to have a bit of a rock and roll fetish, he took her to meet the Rolling Stones, circa 1970, and Heroes-period Bowie and just for old times’ sake, to Manchester in 1983 to see The Smiths. She seemed to love it all. They both did. But just below the surface, there was still grief--a current of it, strong and fast, with a dangerous undertow. Dip too far into it, and it would take them both down.

But then she started singing.

He was asleep the first time it happened. It stole into his dreams, wrapping him in songs like silk, submerging him in music like amniotic fluid. Waking was like being born all over again, born to the sound of her laughter and the warm hum of the TARDIS.

That day, she took his hand.

And every night, she sings. Sings him through work and through play. Through reading textbooks and Tennyson. Sings him through baths and brushing. Through toast and tea. Sings to him until he no longer knows where he and the TARDIS end and she begins.

Sings until he’s not sure she has an end.

He loves her more for that little bit of Time still inside of her. But he’s more afraid of her, too, for that little bit of the Wolf.

It’s the Wolf that will make her leave him. He knows this as well as he knows his own name. And, like his name, he doesn’t share it with her. She doesn’t have to know that she’s not safe, and she’ll never be safe. That, in the end, the song will steal her away.

And like he grieved for himself, he’ll grieve for her, too.


End file.
